Soldiers Quell Unrest In Caspian Sea Town

MOSCOW -- Military forces were called in to quell rioting in a southern Soviet city on Sunday and have remained there to enforce a nighttime curfew, the government said on Tuesday.

Confirming that violent disturbances on Sunday in the city of Sumgait were related to nationalist unrest that has recently flared across the same region, the government reported there had been an unspecified number of injuries in clashes in the city between Azerbaidzhanis and Armenians.

Sumgait, an industrial center on the Caspian Sea, is in the Azerbaidzhan republic, which along with the neighboring Armenian republic has been shaken by nationalist protests and clashes in the last two weeks.

The application of military force to deal with the violence in Sumgait, and the imposition of a curfew, reinforced the impression that the disturbances in Azerbaidzhan and Armenia have been among the most serious outbreaks of nationalist unrest since consolidation of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s.

A government spokesman, Gennadi I. Gerasimov, said at a regular Foreign Ministry briefing on Tuesday that the situation in Sumgait was quiet but tense.

Gerasimov confirmed reports from government officials in Baku, the Azerbaidzhan capital, that there had been injuries during Sunday`s rioting. He said the rioting was caused by nationalist tensions that had spread across the region in recent weeks.

Unofficial reports from Baku said that the disturbances in Sumgait, which has grown over the last 40 years from a village of 6,000 residents to a city with a population of 223,000, were touched off by news reports on Sunday that two Azerbaidzhanis had been killed, and others wounded, in clashes with Armenians earlier in the month.

The two groups are divided by religion -- the Armenians primarily Christian, the Azerbaidzhanis primarily Shiite Moslem -- and by a history of conflict predating the formation of the Soviet Union.

The recent spate of nationalist unrest in the region has centered on longstanding demands that a predominantly Armenian district within Azerbaidzhan, the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, be attached to Armenia. Sumgait is about 150 miles northeast of Nagorno-Karabakh and 20 miles from Baku.